his wife is right. he is probably a carrier of the disorder. from my basic understand of genetics, it is easier for certain diseases to be passed off to males because the only have one x chromosome, as opposed to females, who have two. anyways, that would make john a carrier of a bad disease.
You can't persuade fanboys. You'd be better off trying to convince a wall. ~CodeNamePlasmaSnake~
I doubt it. Either you have the disease or not. Those without it are useful to the state. The disease is probably very rare and they can always kill any of his grandchildren who have it, which I doubt they would. More like one person every few generations.
In our reality, there is a significant correlation between radiation exposure during fetus development and birth defects. And children of Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors conceived after exposure showed the same rate as baseline Japanese population, so the two younger children are likely unaffected.
The Smiths can plausibly blame Thomas' "defectiveness" on the nuclear bomb and that the two younger girls are still "uncontaminated" good Aryan breeding stock.
Thomas' inherited disease is "Hollywood Mixed Type." He could have Frederich's Atxaia, a form of MD that can begin presenting in the early teens. What FA does not cause is Absence Seizures. Unless I missed something. Is Thomas also epileptic?
I knew a high school girl who began showing symptoms in seventh grade and by tenth grade she was in a wheel chair.
What we saw of Thomas' symptoms in first season, he had moments of coordination loss and stumbling. That is how it started with the girl I knew.
Another student I knew who had FA was also in a wheelchair by high school, and suffered another complication - blindness. He woke up one morning unable to see.
Both the students had one parent with FA.
People with FA will also develop cardiac problems due to the nervous system not communicating with the heart.
It is not a sex linked inherited disease, and is autosomal recessive, meaning the flawed genes on chromosome nine can run through families without affecting anyone. Autosomal recessive diseases need two - one from each parent to present itself. And even if both parents have carry the recessive gene for FA, there is still a chance the children won't be affected. I'm a bit rusty on my college bio, but I think with recessive genetic diseases you have a one-in-four chance of being afflicted, one in four chance of being a carrier and 50-50 chance of not carrying the gene and not being affected.
In MITHC the only way Thomas could have FA would be if both parents were carriers of the bad gene.
So it looks like the form of MD Thomas has is FA
Here's an article about FA and other near-muscular disorders. https://www.mda.org/disease/friedreichs-ataxia